These guys should talk to any labor unions there are to start causing strikes and lobby for legislature. If the manufacturers are going to play hardball this way, get the unions involved. Those manufacturers and users have money, lots of money, the retooling costs are a lot but frankly they could absorb it easily. But any time a stockholder sees a dip in a company's funds it's the end of the world.

It has the same bleak and desperate feeling of Fallout, along with the same feeling of seeing abandoned homes and buildings, along with characters and factions that are not so larger than life, but are still eerie because of the way the bleak setting has gotten to them.

Yep, games will be key. Despite the price, there's still a lot of good features packed into the system. While I do understand that people want the option of skipping such features for a lower price point, Sony will need to leverage those features and get some new exclusives to replace the ones they've lost. Once this happens, it could be enough to make more people overlook the price.

I know that in general they're a good brand for memory related products like USB drives and even MP3 players. They're reliable and they tend to use good parts. Albiet they come at a cost because of that.

And yeah, there's a different between a much more expenseive sandisk flash drive and a cheaper flash drive. Namely one of the things I've noticed with cheaper flash drives is that they have troubles transferring larger files, even if the flash drive can fit the file, it's often the hardware the manages the transfers on the drive are faulty and give errors partway through, not so on sandisk drives.

One of the main reasons why I get ATI cards is they have consistantly better color quality on their cards. NVidia has really closed the gap, but ATI is still better, and I'm not overly concerned with performance.

Word is AMD is introducing their new chipset soon, Barcelona, starting as a quad core chip. Not sure if they'll take the tech and move it to dual cores.

Um, they did, they took it to cutscenes when that happened and you got high resolution CG cutscenes for those. Those are hand animated setups.

Sometimes, it's just easier, cheaper, or saves more time to make it a CG, either in house or farmed out somewhere. If they had gone in and made all those high detail in-game setups, not only would they have to make the models, rig them, and then hand animate them, it's also a great deal of time adding more tech into the engine that has to be prototyped, tested, made useable, then fully implemented.

I think you're asking too much of game developers from the KoTOR era. Right now it looks like Mass Effect is on the ball, but only because of the system power, and the technical knowledge was available to do such things.

I dunno, a man-o-war can certainly blow apart any smaller ships in its way.

There wasn't much mention of teaming up in that preview however. But it did sound like you could, so that's a good thing. I wouldn't mind sailing the seas with a GT group sometime.

It'd be very cool to sign up with one of the nation's militaries as part of a large forum group, then sail around in large warship packs going to each contested port. Or going the pirate route, since they get into PVP first when a port is contested.

The most interesting thing here is that all these features described don't sound all that difficult to implement tech-wise.

I'd actually sworn off paying for MMOs because all they were to me was grind fest, time sink, slot machines that didn't give you any money back.

If this really works, I'll gladly pay a monthly fee for such a game.

EDIT: OMG! I just read the crafting system, it's yet again exactly what I was looking for. No hassle crafting, still limited by time, and forces you to interact and trade with other players. But instead of sitting and staring at a menu and clicking, you just say what you want and wait for it to come out while you adventure.

And another edit: The gear system, or lack thereof, is one of my most desired features. It's all about the ports, land, ships, and fighting.

Eh, I don't know about that. Many people may hate the content itself, but Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, and others have been doing much more impressively realized cutscenes in-engine than what Bioware and Obsidian have been able to do in their games. Even keeping the same character models, the story sequences of those games would have benefitted enormously from a bit of of dynamic use of the camera and some additional character animation.

I agree with Kevin. RPGs have been doing more with less than Bioware/Obisidian has had at their disposal (Xbox and cutting edge PCs) for several years. I <3 Bioware but they have been sorely negligent in keeping their in-engine cutscenes and story presentation with the times.

Actually, you're not quite correct about your comparison of FF and MGS cutscenes with the in game characters for Bioware games like KoTOR and Mass Effect.

While both games process (animate, blend, shaders) and render the digital actors in-engine and in real-time, the difference is whether the animation is also done in real time using systems, or hand animated beforehand.

The FF and MGS cutscenes were just that, cutscenes. They were rendered in engine, but they were hand animated instead of relying on dynamic systems. Everything from a walk, to the character's mouth movements were hand animated. Also in these games you had little in the way of player choice. Tidus and Yuna spoke set lines of dialogue, maybe there were one or two more lines added, but usually not. Same for MGS, which had very set dialogue.

KoTOR and Mass Effect, on the other hand, have many more situations, emotions, dialogue and thus for efficiency's sake, has to rely on dynamic animation systems. These systems take small segments of animation, full body poses, facial expressions, and mouth shapes; and find ways to blend between these. There's still animators involved, but it's these systems that are opened up to the game/level designers that allow them to add in complex looking actions and facial expressions, even lip synch, without the slow process of hand animation. Usually it's via script files, with other programs that parse the dialogue text, or even the audio file itself and automatically lip synchs. Because these systems need to handle so many situations, they often lead to generic looking actions. But, it looks like with the latest tech they've improved this a lot for ME. Now, that's not to say there's no hand animated sequences in ME, it's just that it's inefficient to force a studio's animators to go through every scene in a 60+ hour game hand animating each character in each scene, and accounting for changes in the plot due to player choice.

One example of something not possible in KoTOR, FF10, or MGS without dynamic animation systems is the new ME conversation system. You can actually interrupt another character's dialogue, and change the entire flow of a conversation. In other games this is certainly possible with a lot of scripting, but not feasable financially since you have to go through every scene's dialogue to handle the animation changes.

In fact, these games often switch out gameplay models with cutscene specific models with higher detail when needed. For example, any time you saw a character's face close up in FF10, that's actually a seperate head model for that character. Likewise, many models you see in MGS cutscenes aren't the same ones used while actually playing, of if they are it has a much more advanced rig (underlying bone and muscle structure simulation) than the gameplay model. Although, it's likely that they did the same thing for KoTOR and Mass Effect since it's such an efficient way to work, only using the extra character detail when needed, otherwise keeping that CPU power for gameplay.

Say goodbye to his Live account, and he could be arrested if there were minors in that game. In fact, I kind of want him to get arrested and be charged with sex crimes. It'll ruin him for the rest of his life, but such is natural selection.

Keep in mind that at the time there was no hardware or engine technology available for the kind of detail Mass Effect and Half-Life 2 have for their digital actors.

I study 3D also, and making 3D actors (modeled, textured, rigged, and moving realistically) of that quality is hard enough on for one model. They've got to be using some sort of procedural pipeline or scripting for the less important NPCs because individually making all those side characters is madness.

Dai Senraiku is a long running hex based turn based strategy game (not sim) for various systems. It's more game than sim, but has a lot of realistic elements and better presentation than the usual hex game.

But what Mass Effect does over Star Wars so well is that it strips out a lot of the baggage and immaturity of the subject matter. There's no light and dark side, just people trying to get things done. More intersting politics, more places to visit instead of relying on the same 10 planets. Mass Effect becomes less spiritual and more just a physics phenomena. The focus goes back to the grunts on the ground, rather than people fighting with light swords in space.

So I just played both sides off each other so hilariously. I'm sure others did this too.

Basically, I first talked to the duty guys at the farm and they gave me the mission to kill the sniper. I did that with a stealthy knife kill, no one saw it. Then I went to talk to the leader of Freedom and told him about the Duty guys. Well then they organized a group to go kill the Duty squad. Unbeknownst to them, the Duty guys had already moved up to Freedom base wall and blew a hole in it. I had run ahead of the Freedom guys charging out of their base just in time to see the Duty guys do this. The Duty guys stormed in, with me behind to see who would win. Well The duty guys did well to start, but they split up and were overwhelmed when the Freedom guys who ran out returned. After a bunch of cool firefights, the last Duty guy got killed, and I got the quest reward from the Freedom guys. And yet, I never harmed a Duty soldier, so didn't get the penalty for it.

So, I just walked around looting corpses and taking my pick of the dropped weapon. I'll never know what the duty guys would have given me as a reward, but I doubt it'll be as good as this windfall.